Category: Death and Immortality

Ash Wednesday

Vanitas2"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.

How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?

 

The typical secularist is a reality denier who hides from the unalterable facts of death and impermanence.  This is shown by his self-deceptive behavior: he lives as if he will live forever and as if his projects are ultimately meaningful even though he knows that he won't and that they aren't.  If he were to face reality he would have to be a nihilist.  That he isn't shows that he is fooling himself.

More here.

Christopher Hitchens has been dead for over eleven years now.  In Platonic-Augustinian-Christian perspective, what no longer exists never truly existed.  So here we have a man who never truly existed but who denied the existence of the Source of his own ephemeral quasi-existence. Curious.

Death as a Boon to the Spiritual

I read the Sufi mystic Rūmī  (1207-1273) when I lived in Turkey, 1995-1996. Here is an entry from my Turkish journal written on Christmas Eve morning, 1995. The following quotation is from The Masnavi.

Death is in reality a boon to the spiritual, and it is only fools who cry, "Would that this world might endure forever, and that there were no such thing as death."

Sufism is the mystical branch of Islam. Our Sufi is making two claims. One is that death is the door to eternal life. The other is that only the fool fails to perceive the profoundly unsatisfactory character of this life. You are not a fool if you deny the first, though you may be wrong; you are a fool if you deny the second. To want to live on indefinitely in this world as it is is a clear indicator of spiritual blindness.

So I say, "Up or out!" What do I mean?

Academic tenure is sometimes described as 'up or out.' You either gain tenure, within a limited probationary period, or you must leave. I tend to think of life like that: either up or out, either promotion to a Higher Life or annihilation. I wouldn't want an indefinitely prolonged stay in this vale of probation.

In plain English: I wouldn't want to live forever in this world. Thus for metaphysical reasons alone I have no interest in cryogenic or cryonic life extension. Up or out!

It would be interesting to delve into some of the issues surrounding cryonics and the trans-humanist fantasies that subserve this hare-brained scheme. The possibilities of fraud and foul play seem endless.  Some controversies reported here.   But for now I will merely note that Alcor is located in Scottsdale, Arizona. The infernal Valle del Sol would not be my first choice for such an operation. One hopes that they have good backup in case of a power outage.

Death, Consolation, and ‘Life Goes On’

Substack latest.

Transhumanist fantasies aside, we will all die.  Faced with the inevitable, one naturally looks for consolation.  Some console themselves with the thought that 'life goes on.'  In the words of the great Laura Nyro song, And When I Die:

And when I die
And when I'm gone
There'll be one child born in this world
To carry on, carry on.

The singer consoles herself with the thought that life goes on.  But is the thought that 'life goes on' a legitimate and reasonable source of consolation? Or is it an "escapist self-deception" as Robert Spaemann asserts? (Persons, Oxford UP, 2017, 115. Orig. publ. in German in 1996; first publ. in English in 2006)

I attempt in this entry to show that Spaemann is right.

 

Body, Soul, Self

  Tony Flood writes:

Hard to imagine Hitchens at almost 73, had he lived. Great post, but I have a question.

Briefly, why do you refer to the soul as one's "true self"? Genesis 2:7 reports that from the dust of the ground (ha-adamah) God created ha-adam, i.e., "the man." The man became a living soul (le-nephesh hayyah) when God breathed the breath of life (nishmat hayyim) into him. The pre-animated ha-adamah was neither dead nor a "less-than-true" or incomplete human being; the animating nephesh is not the man's self or ego. When God withdraws the breath of life from a soul, that soul dies. I think know your non-Genesis source, but I want to hear it from you. Your passing comment reminded me that I had written quite a bit about this earlier this year.
 
Also interested in knowing whether there's anything you want to share from your retreat.
 
Tony is referring to this sentence of mine: "Those of us who champion  free speech miss him [Hitchens] and what he would have had to say about the current state of the world had he taken care of himself, or rather his body, his true self being his soul." What I wrote suggests that there is a difference between body and soul in a person, and that the soul is the person's self.  But why true self?  Well, if I can exist without a body, but I cannot exist without (being identical to) a soul, then 'my' soul, or rather me qua soul is 'my' true self. There are a number of different questions here, all very difficult.
 
To begin, we need to clarify our terminology. 'Soul' (psyche, anima, Seele) is ambiguous.  It could refer to the life-principle in living things.  'Soul' could also be used to refer to the subject or possessor of a person's mental states. For the Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne, "Each actual human being is essentially  a pure mental substance . . . " and ". . . a person has mental properties because their [sic] soul has mental properties." (Are We Bodies or Souls? Oxford UP, 2019, p. 80)  
 
Now ask yourself which of the following is true:
 
(A) I am (identical to) a substance the form of which is my soul and the matter of which is my body.  Anima forma corporis: the soul is the form of the body.
 
(P) I am (identical to) a purely mental substance that contingently possesses a living human body.
 
A substance may be defined as any individual entity metaphysically capable of independent existence, where 'individual' implies unrepeatability and impredicability.
 
(A) is the Aristotelian-Thomistic view. A person is one substance, the individual human being, the soul of which is not a substance. 
 
(P) is the Platonic-Cartesian view. It is substance-dualist. In the book mentioned, Swinburne defends substance dualism according to which "each human consists of two parts — a soul (a pure mental substance) and a body (a physical substance)." (p. 141)
 
So, when I wrote in my Substack entry about Hitchens taking care of himself, or rather his body, I signaled my inclination to accept the Platonic-Cartesian view. You can destroy your body with hooch and weed, but not your soul.  
 
Now which of the two views above is more biblical? This, I take it, is the question that exercises Tony, and I suspect that his view is either (A) or neither. I suspect that Tony's view is that the Platonic-Cartesian view is wholly unbiblical and thus that Christianity has little or nothing to do with Platonism.  
 
Serendipitously, Tony's question ties in nicely with a discussion I had with a man at the monastery about Mark 12: 18-27 and Christ's argument against the Sadducees re: bodily resurrection. Don't we need Platonic souls during the time between hora mortis nostrae and general resurrection?
 
Combox open.

Ratzinger on the Resurrection of the Body

Substack latest.

You will note that in my writings I use the gender-neutral 'man' and 'he.'  It is important to stand in defense of the mother tongue. She is under vicious assault these days. You owe a lot to your mother; show her some respect. On Easter Sunday and on every day. Anyone who takes offense at standard English takes offense inappropriately.

Dust and Ashes

Vanitas 2"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.

Luther's German:  Im Schweiße deines Angesichts sollst du dein Brot essen, bis daß du wieder zu Erde werdest, davon du genommen bist. Denn du bist Erde und sollst zu Erde werden.

Douay-Rheims: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the earth out of which thou wast taken: for dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return."

How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?

The typical secularist is a reality denier who hides from the unalterable facts of death and impermanence.  This is shown by his self-deceptive behavior: he lives as if he will live forever and as if his projects are meaningful even though he knows, at a level deeper than his self-deception,  that he won't and that they aren't.  If he were to face reality he would have to be a nihilist.  That he isn't shows that he is fooling himself.

More here.

You Are Going to Die.

Christopher Hitchens has been dead for over ten years now.  In Platonic perspective, what no longer exists never truly existed.  So here we have a man who never truly existed but who denied the existence of the self-existent Source of his own ephemeral quasi-existence. Curious.

On the still life: A meatless skull in the gathering darkness, the candle having just gone out, life's flame having gone to smoke, unable to read, with no need for food. The globe perhaps signifies the universality of the skull owner's predicament and fate.

On the Eternal in Man

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (tr. Alexander Dru, Pantheon Books, 1950, p. 67, #263, written 1940):

The man who explicitly does not believe and does not will to believe (for the will to believe belongs to believing) in an eternal life, that is to say in a personal life after death, will become an animal, an animal being which among other things, man is. Man is 'planned as spirit,' as Kierkegaard puts it, but that includes the immortality of the soul. Whoever relinquishes that also gives up the spirit of man.

Man alone among the animals raises the question whether he is more than an animal.  His raising of this question does not prove  that he is more than an animal; perhaps it proves only that he is the most pretentious of all animals, a crazy animal, an evolutionary fluke who merely fancies himself more than  an animal. Such a fanciful conceit might even be accorded survival value within a naturalist scheme. Thinking himself the crown of creation, a child of God, with divine sanction to lord it over, but also cherish and protect the critters beneath him, this lofty self-conception, even if false, might enhance his chances of survival. It could be like that, or at least I cannot see a way definitively to exclude this epistemic possibility.

Or it could be like this:  Man's having a world (Welt) and not merely an environment (Umwelt) like the animals points to a higher origin, a spiritual origin,  and a higher destiny.  Elsewhere I catalog twelve meanings of 'world'; here I am using the term in my twelfth sense, the transcendental-phenomenological sense.  It remains an open question whether the world in this sense has an ontic anchor in God, whether the light of the transcendental-phenomenological Lichtung (clearing) has an onto-theological Source. We cannot know it to be the case, but we can reasonably believe it to be the case. That is as good as it gets here below.  And so I am brought around, once again, to the fact that, in the end, one must decide what to believe and how to live.

Haecker is right to point out that "the will to believe belongs to believing." Not all belief is voluntary, but religious and anti-religious belief is.  The will comes into it, as it does not in the case of some such mundane belief as that the Sun has risen. You are free to believe that you are a complex physical system slated for utter annihilation in a few years, months, days, minutes, and you are free to believe that you are "planned as spirit."  Either way reasons can be adduced, reasons that are not obviously bad reasons.

Boethius and the Second Death of Oblivion: Ubi nunc fidelis ossa Fabricii manent?

We die twice. We pass out of life, and then we pass out of memory, the encairnment in oblivion more final than the encairnment in rocks. Boethius puts the following words into the mouth of Philosophia near the end of Book Two of the Consolations of Philosophy.

Where are Fabricius's bones, that honourable man? What now is Brutus or unbending Cato? Their fame survives in this: it has no more than a few slight letters shewing forth an empty name. We see their noble names engraved, and only know thereby that they are brought to naught. Ye lie then all unknown, and fame can give no knowledge of you. But if you think that life can be prolonged by the breath of mortal fame, yet when the slow time robs you of this too, then there awaits you but a second death.

And why are these engraved names empty? Not just because their referents have ceased to exist, and not just because a time will come when no one remembers them, but because no so-called proper name is proper. All are common in that no name can capture the haecceity of its referent. So not only will we pass out of life and out of memory; even in life and in memory our much vaunted individuality is ineffable, and, some will conclude, nothing at all.

"We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep." (Shakespeare, The Tempest.) 

Contemplating Suicide?

Are you quite sure that there is a way out? It may be that there is no exit.  You can of course destroy your body, and that might do the trick. But then again it might not. Or is it perfectly obvious that you are either identical to your body or necessarily dependent for your existence on its existence?  You might want to think about this before making the leap of faith in ultimate nonentity.  

Pike Other SideIt would be fairly easy to give strong arguments why TO BE is not the same as TO BE PHYSICAL. Think of so-called 'abstract objects.' It is much more difficult to argue persuasively that the identity fails in the case of persons. And yet persons are rather remarkable. The ones we are regularly acquainted with are also animals. Sunk in animality as we are, it is easy to think that we are are just highly evolved animals.  It is easy to miss the wonder of personhood. But the abyss that separates man from the animal should give one pause. 

Bishop James A. Pike's son Jim committed suicide. He supposedly communicated the following message to his father from the Other Side:

I thought there was a way out; I wanted out; I've found there is no way out. I wish I had stayed to work out my problems in more familiar surroundings.  (James A. Pike, The Other Side: An Account of My Experiences with Psychic Phenomena, Doubleday, 1968, p. 118.)

 

Pike James A.If you were around in the '60s and hip to what was happening you will recall Bishop Pike. He was a theological liberal who made quite a splash the ripples of which have long since subsided. The book I have cited  is worth reading but best consumed with a mind both open and critical.

Do You Value This Life? How Much?

Death bedIt is the hour of death.  You are informed by an utterly reliable source that you have exactly two options.  You can either accept death and with it utter annihilation of the self, or you can repeat your life with every last detail the same.  But if every last detail is to be the same, and you decide to sign up for another round on the wheel of becoming, you realize that you are signing up for an infinity of rounds.

So which will it be?  Has your life been so valuable that you would be willing to repeat it, and indeed repeat it endlessly? Noch einmal? If you say yes, you are at the upper limit of life affirmation. For me, once is enough. Up or out! This life has point only as prelude. The wheel of samsara is  the wheel of Ixion, and an eternity of re-turning is a shabby and indeed horrifying substitute for true eternity.

Nietzsche was a genuine instance of homo religiosus, but possessing as he did the bladed intellect of the skeptic, he could not bring himself to believe.